written language, or are at least intelligible only by reference to the latter, while at the same time they endow it with a clearness and above all a terseness to which the colloquial can never attain.
This article may appropriately conclude by dispelling an illusion under which many intelligent persons labour, namely, that the Japanese nation is on the eve of dropping its own written system and taking up with ours instead. There is no longer the slightest chance of so sweeping a change. There once seemed to be—somewhere about 1885—and much time, money, and energy were devoted to the cause by an association called the Rōmaji Kwai, or Romanisation Society, which lingered on some eight or ten years and then perished. Besides the weight of custom, the most obvious of the causes that concurred to bring about this ill-success has been anticipated in the preceding paragraph, where mention was made of the superiority of the existing written language to the colloquial as a terse and precise instrument of thought. Supported by the Chinese character, Japanese writers can render every shade of meaning represented in the columns of a European newspaper or the pages of a technical European work, whether financial, diplomatic, administrative, commercial, legal, critical, theological, philosophical, or scientific. Who could wish them to throw away their intellectual weapons, and put themselves on a level with the men of the stone age? They could not do so if they would. But a third cause—a more general one—must be sought in the fact that ideographic writing apparently possesses some inherent strength that makes it tend to triumph over (without entirely supplanting) phonetic waiting, whenever the two are brought into competition in the same area. All the countries under Chinese influence exemplify this little known fact in a striking manner. Egypt, too, retained its hieroglyphics to the end. In Europe such competition has scarcely taken place, except in the case of the symbols for numbers and a few other ideas; but there, too, the general law has asserted itself. Which is the simpler, the more graphic, the more commonly used,—"three hundred and sixty-five" or "365," "thirty-five degrees forty-one minutes twenty--
